DELI DELIGHTS Of the many, many things to eat at DSD, the deconstructed chicken pot pie is a real winner.

Despite breakfast all day, comfort food, the over-abundant choices of a deli menu, and the Jules Verne decorative contraptions of artist Mark Fisher — the most remarkable items at Deluxe Station Diner are things to drink. On the alcohol side, someone is making in-house bitters and grenadine, and using them to craft classic cocktails of depth and complexity. For more deli-cate tastes, they have the full line of Dr. Brown's sodas ($2.50), including the classic (if dreadful) "Cel-Ray" tonic — a culinary bit of Edwardian sci-fi all by itself — and an authentic"NYC egg cream" ($2.50).

My cocktail opinion is based on a Ward 8 ($8), featuring so much of the house grenadine it appears pink rather than the usual orange. No problem, as the sourness of rye whiskey and lemon and the dash of bitters make for a bracing, refreshing, and deceptively easy drink. They also produced, on a cold evening, an outstanding hot toddy ($8), a drink that seldom tastes as good as the idea of it, hot whiskey being rather like hot sake, only more so.

The egg cream — it has no eggs or cream, but develops a brief frothy head achieved by spritzing seltzer onto a base of strong chocolate milk — shows similar attention to detail. If they are not using the canonical Fox's U-Bet syrup, they have found a substitute with the warmth of invert sugar (also a key to Godiva chocolate, if you ever want to counterfeit that).

They only have four beers on draft, but one is Smuttynose IPA from New Hampshire ($5), and another is Mayflower (yes, from Plymouth) Porter ($5). The latter is toasty rich and warm, so what else is necessary? Perhaps something lighter, and a bottle of Oregons Full Sail Session Lager ($4) has a nice hit of cascade hops in what is otherwise an American-style beer.

Back to breakfast. My benchmark is hash and eggs ($10.50). The hash is an ethics test for the chef, and Deluxe Station hash is curiously all shredded corned beef. Good, but salty when un-moderated by onions and potatoes. The potatoes are home fries taking up half the oversized platter, big chunks and not so seasoned, but excellent home fries. The dropped eggs are correct. And they offer toast or salad. Are they kidding?

Pastrami and eggs ($9.50) is a classic omelet, but beware of the hot pastrami on rye, "NYC deli style" ($8.95). It is not. New York pastrami is steamed and handcut; Boston pastrami, with a few exceptions, has always been sliced and boiled to a flavorless, fatty mess. That's the case here. A Cubano ($8.95) isn't grilled and isn't clear on which kind of Cuban sandwich it is trying to be, but with two kinds of pork and pickles, it's good eating. A shrimp quesadilla ($9.95) is the usual mélange of flavors but so generously stuffed you will take half home for further analysis. A really positive surprise is the Middle Eastern Platter ($12.50) with quite good falafel, tabouli, and an unbilled garlic-yogurt-cucumber salad, and passable feta, pita triangles, olives, hummus, salad, and a hard-boiled egg (is that what puts it on the breakfast menu?)

The Spot Café Your typical cheap-eats reviewer spends a lot of time in diners: they're America's original inexpensive quick-service restaurants, and most are a step up from modern fast-food franchises.

Dan’s Place We didn't notice any grizzlies or cougars as road kill on our trek to Dan's Place, though we kept our eyes peeled there in the wilds of West Greenwich.

The Daily Grill You can tell that the Daily Grill isn't from around here, because it describes itself as "modeled after the great big city grills of the '30s and '40s."

Gourmet kitchen The gourmet recreation of classic deli cuisine, recently identified as a movement in the national media, has made an ambiguous appearance here in Portland in the form of Nosh Kitchen Bar.

Parish Cafe and Bar The edge of gentrification can present some close-minded folks with a barrier to finding good cheap eats.

The Regal Beagle The Regal Beagle is making a quick success doing what almost all the new restaurants want to do: small plates; comfort food with a gourmet twist; a mixture of high and low; a bit of locovore, green, and slow fare; some salty fast food; interesting drinks; and scrambled nostalgia.

The Village Haven We were headed to a concert in Cumberland and we thought we'd make a slight detour to North Smithfield — the village of Forestdale, to be precise.

Barlow’s Restaurant It’s not unusual for this column to have a different opinion of restaurants than the column in the Boston Globe — I favor a flatter bell curve.

South End Buttery South End Buttery started with cupcakes and coffee, but opened up a dining room below street level two summers ago, and has since gradually taken on more serious cheffery.

Review: Thornton's Grille Restaurants are notoriously difficult businesses to start up, with survival rates not unlike those of small countries with larger, hostile neighbors. But some people know how to put them together so they'll stick around awhile.

Lee's Place Burgers Americans eat more than a billion hamburgers each year, most of them at fast-food restaurants. That's a lot of bad, sad burgers.

REVIEW: BONCHON | August 10, 2012 What am I doing in this basement in Harvard Square, reviewing the second location of a multi-national franchise chain?

REVIEW: CARMELINA'S | July 25, 2012 After a good run with "Italian tapas" under the name Damiano (a play on the given name of chef-owner Damien "Domenic" DiPaola), this space has been rechristened as Carmelina's — after the chef's mother and his first restaurant, opened when he was an undergraduate in Western Mass — and the menu reconfigured to feature more entrées.

REVIEW: TONIC | July 06, 2012 Bad restaurant idea number 16: let's do a neighborhood bar-bistro where there already is one.

REVIEW: HAPPY’S BAR AND KITCHEN | June 20, 2012 In a year of bad restaurant ideas, one of the better bets is to have a successful fancy-food chef try a downscale restaurant.